Towards Service Engineering: Service Orientation and Business-IT Alignment

The rapid movement towards service orientation, on both the business and technology fronts, offers unprecedented opportunities for business-IT alignment. As we will argue, to achieve true agility in its service provisioning to meet rapidly changing requirements, an organization needs a multi-dimensional business-IT alignment strategy--alignment via architecture, via governance and via communication--integrated with a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) paradigm to develop their service-based system. To help engineer such a service-based system with this integrated approach, we have developed a 3-layer, multi-disciplinary BITAM-SOA Service Engineering Schematic. The schematic also serves as a process model for service design and management. This schematic is rooted in the Resource- Based View theory perspective: business value can be created by IT-enhanced capabilities that can dynamically integrate resources. The strategic, managerial and practical implications of this schematic on service oriented implementations are exemplified and discussed.